Today, we'll explore how marketing can act as a core business growth function, the role of data in shaping strategy, and how to build a truly customer-centric organization.

Anna, thank you so much for joining us today. Your career path is unique. Let me get this straight — you started in computer engineering, moved into finance, and then came to marketing. So can you talk us through that journey that you've been on?

I think it's always been a result of my curiosity.

Right.

So I began as a computer engineer. Within engineering, I focused on data. And I was very curious about data, data architecture, and transforming data into information.

Then, as I started working as a consultant in the Big Four, I felt curious about what was happening on the other side of my conversation. So how are these business leaders actually using this information to drive decisions and manage?

And I guess my curiosity just lent itself to an invitation to join the other side.

Right. Right.

So I moved into management consulting rather than data consulting. And then from management consulting, I got an invitation to work in financial services for an insurance company.

Okay.

I'm there. I'm enjoying learning business finance. I'm enjoying doing forecasting and putting a lot of my data principles to use — doing a lot of forecasting, a lot of modelling.

Then I just became curious about, okay, now what? And I became very interested in strategy. From there, I went to do an MBA here at London Business School and became very fascinated about strategy and the role of thinking about how we find that fit between the global landscape and how we are able to actually deliver on customer experience.

So figuring out that plan or that strategy was very interesting. And then I bumped into marketing, actually.

So I went to work for a turnaround bank as head of strategy, and I had a very creative CEO who was also very much a marketeer in essence.

And he figured that I could do marketing just like he did. So I was given the task to rebrand the bank. I was given a number of roles around customer experience, but also in terms of advertising and promotion, and then also external and internal communications.

Right.

And then, as I took on these tasks and these new responsibilities, I actually realised how it was an incredible vehicle to deliver all the strategies that I'd been designing in the previous years.

And on top of that, I realised I do have a creative streak. It's not just finance and coding.

And I realised that's where I'm happiest — where I can actually activate both sides of my brain.

Yeah.

Where I'm doing analytical modelling, working in Excel, and then the next moment I'm thinking about the EQ part of a brand, the EQ part of a brand promise, and how brand, communication, and client experience deliver the strategy every day to customers.

Fabulous.

So thinking back to your engineering days, are there any elements that you can apply in what you're doing at Moneycorp today? Is there anything you've looked back on, or is it just that your experience shapes the way you work — as you're saying, applying both sides of the brain?

Well, I don't know if it's nature or nurture. I don't know if I'm designed like that or if it was engineering that designed it.

I do know that I make a lot of my marketing colleagues and peers — and even external agencies — a bit crazy when I try to put structures and boxes and sequences around things.

And they're thinking, well, that's not how creativity works. And I'm thinking, well, that's the only way it can work in my head.

Yeah.

So I think there's a lot of structure. There's a lot of data informing things.

For me, everything that we do in marketing needs to be data-led. And whether it's concrete data or data samples, there needs to be a reason — there needs to be a “why” — to what we're delivering.

And there needs to be structure. Again, putting things in boxes — which my creative colleagues do sometimes have a hard time with.

Systems thinking — we talked about that earlier. Can you expand on that?

I love systems thinking. I learned systems thinking as an engineer. I didn't realise what I was learning at the time.

That's right.

It was a long time ago. I went through these classes, learned it, structured it, and prepared for the tests.

Many years later, I started to realise that everything that shapes the world around us is part of a system.

And one principle that I apply in systems thinking in every organisation — regardless of what angle I'm looking at — is that the system will always behave the way it's measured.

So I think the most important management tool is actually an incentive tool, or the balanced scorecard, or the recognition tool. Because systems will always behave the way they're measured.

If commissions or bonuses — or even recognition models — favour specific metrics, the organisation will find a way to make those metrics work. And it really shapes behaviour.

And behind behaviour comes everything else. Ethics, product, client-centricity — or not.

But it's quite fascinating.

From systems thinking, that's the main principle that I apply in everything that I do. But I've applied it in strategy as well as marketing.

Right. I love that. I hadn't heard it talked about in that way.

You're essentially saying: think of the behaviour you're trying to create, put the measurement in place to track that behaviour, and the system will flow toward that point.

Absolutely.

Or, as a colleague of mine says, put a metric in place — because from a rational perspective, that's the KPI we're trying to measure — but then do a little backward engineering and ask: am I going to get unwanted behaviours from this metric?

Right.

So a lot of unintended consequences come from what we're designing. Spending a little extra time thinking about how someone might use the metric in the wrong way — and what impact that will have on behaviour — is really important.

Quite often we can look at a balanced scorecard or a behaviour and trace it back to the KPI behind it.

Is there any example you can give — either in your current role or a previous role — where you've applied that systems thinking and built it into a marketing or business concept?

Not so much in terms of a marketing tool, but maybe a sales enablement tool. I'm not going to reveal which company it was.

But one example that comes to mind was a sales incentive model. The KPI that the sales team was recognised for actually countered another lead-generation channel.

And in order for this specific outbound sales channel to work, it was actually inhibiting the inbound channel.

Got it.

And it was interesting to realise that there is only so much effort, energy, and investment we can put into outbound outreach because it will always be limited by the other channels.

So not strictly marketing, but it had implications for go-to-market — particularly around investment between inbound and outbound.

Okay — let's bring ourselves back on track.

No problem. Systems thinking is fascinating — you could spend the whole day on it.

Let's talk about communication in marketing. You've spoken about marketing as more than just communication. You say it plays a role in shaping supply and demand. How does that thinking shape your go-to-market strategies?

At the end of the day, that's what we're doing — activating supply and demand.

Start with the demand curve. The sweet spot of marketing — and any business — is figuring out where the two curves cross.

If you think about demand, it's about understanding what clients want.

I've worked across financial services — consulting, insurance, banking — global organisations and small ones. Bankers have been around finance all their lives, studying and excelling in it.

And the answer is often: we know what's best for customers and we always have the customer's interests at heart.

That's great. But how about listening to customers? Because customers often know even better.

So for the last ten years I've spent a lot of time reminding people in the room that, yes, we all care about customers — but customers know best.

It's about activating the customer voice — asking the right questions, understanding pain points, concerns, and what they actually need — and designing products and services accordingly.

That's the demand side.

But we also don't live in isolation. No organisation does.

We can decide not to worry about competitors — just be the best version of ourselves — but that only works to a point.

If a competitor moves faster, innovates faster, or helps customers realise they need something new — like the iPhone — we have to respond.

None of us knew we needed an iPhone.

Exactly.

So competition pushes us to innovate faster. That's the supply side.

When we understand our role in supply, understand demand, and find the intersection between them — that's when we design the right products and deliver them in the best way.

And honestly, I can't think about marketing or business without that simple microeconomics framework.

Listening to you, I wanted to ask about something else.

You've seen many different types of businesses in financial services through consulting and your career. Have you heard of the Edelman Trust Barometer?

Yes.

They run a global survey each year measuring trust across industries. For as long as I've followed it, financial services has usually been one of the lowest-trust sectors.

Now you're saying that people in the industry genuinely believe they're acting in customers' best interests. But there's clearly a mismatch there.

What do you think the industry has been doing wrong — or what needs to change?

That's a great question. Let me think through it in real time.

If I go back to my insurance experience, there was a huge trust gap between insurers and customers.

The fine print. The exclusions.

Insurance is complex, but there were also many years of mis-selling.

Going back to systems thinking — the incentive was often “one more policy.”

Fear was often used to sell: if something terrible happens, you're doomed, so buy this policy.

But not enough clarity was given.

Insurance companies have spent years trying to improve this — making the fine print clearer, simplifying language, and increasing transparency about what customers are actually getting.

And I think that's the direction financial services needs to keep moving in.

I genuinely believe most bankers do care about customers. But the mismatch comes from thinking “we know best.”

Instead, we should focus on helping customers know best.

That means financial literacy, product literacy, and helping people understand long-term financial decisions.

When customers understand more, trust increases.

And I think that's what we've started to see happening recently.

Yes — that aligns with things like the FCA's Consumer Duty rules, which aim to simplify communication and make products easier to understand.

Exactly.

A few years ago we did research with savers asking why they weren't investing. One response was that investment websites felt impenetrable — people felt stupid because they couldn't understand the language.

I think jargon builds up inside industries without people noticing. Marketers sometimes have to step in and say: hold on — customers don't speak like this.

Absolutely.

In a previous role, part of the brand work was reducing the perception of arrogance in banking communication.

It was about creating a more equal playing field in communication and recognising that customers are at the same level.

Banking historically had a certain positioning, but it's changing.

And again, most people working in financial services aren't motivated just by moving money around the world. They want to contribute to society.

For example, a credit company once told me they see their mission as funding real businesses and enabling entrepreneurs.

Right.

We're going a bit off track again!

In a previous role, you applied machine learning to redefine product positioning. How did you share data — and has AI changed your approach to marketing?

Let's go back to the beginning of my career. I was fascinated by data architecture and artificial intelligence.

At the time we didn't have the tools we have today, but I was very curious about AI.

In a previous role I worked with a data scientist. We were both fascinated by technology and business, particularly machine learning.

So we created a side-desk project.

We asked: what if we used machine learning to analyse transactions and see what product the system identifies as the “anchor product”?

Usually someone in the business decides this — mortgages, credit cards, something like that.

Just to clarify — by anchor product, you mean the core product that attracts customers?

Exactly. The product that drives loyalty and brings customers in, with cross-selling happening afterwards.

Typically the anchor product gets the biggest promotions and marketing investment.

So we fed the machine learning model transaction data to see what it would identify.

And interestingly — it wasn't what we expected.

We assumed mortgages would be the anchor product.

But it wasn't.

It turned out to be everyday banking activity — daily transactions using debit or credit cards.

Wow.

Because you’re interacting with the brand every day, right? And you’re looking at it. You might even think that you’re looking at it, but you’re looking at it, and you’re building your relationship every day because you’re looking at it every day.

Just like you have a closer relationship with those humans that you see more often, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And then, so it’s quite interesting because that just totally changed the paradigm around what the go-to-market should be, what the pricing should be, what the cross-selling and upselling should be, and what order it should take place. I think it’s fascinating because AI will allow us to question our own beliefs. I like questioning my own beliefs.

I like being shown that I’m wrong and figuring out — engineering background again — I do. I like being told that I’m wrong and why, yeah, and being given an opportunity to reshape and redesign from scratch, go back to the drawing board, but with more information this time, and knowing that Plan A doesn’t work.

And if we have all this data nowadays that can help us go into designing, being a lot better informed, it will increase our opportunities to be a lot more productive in the energy that we employ, whether it’s in marketing, or in go-to-market, or in product design or product improvement.

Yep. Yep. Agreed. Agreed.

I can’t remember if I answered the question.

Were you asking how it’s sort of changing, I guess, the way that you’re thinking about doing, utilizing AI and data, and how that’s—

That was the past example.

Now I’m even more fascinated. So I took a sabbatical for about a year and a half, and I come back into the market, want to bring in some customer experience tools. What do I discover that they do now?

And with some passion that I also have on colleague engagement and the role that has in business productivity, we now have tools that correlate client satisfaction with employee engagement.

And intuitively, I think all of us know — every single person that’s ever been in contact with any business knows that happier colleagues produce happier and more satisfied customers.

But now you have that data, right?

That proves and really reinforces that idea. And I think that allows us to shape organizations, organizational models, and cultures in a very different way.

That’s super interesting. So let me just — I just want to drill down into that to explore something. So am I right in saying that from the role of a marketing perspective — which the role there is exploring customer satisfaction and how we can improve customer satisfaction — what you’re saying is that there are tools now that we can link up to employee satisfaction, which traditionally sits more within an HR remit.

Yes.

But now, with these tools, you’ve got the ability for HR to be working in conjunction with marketing in order to deliver a better outcome.

Oh, absolutely. That’s where systems thinking comes in, right? Yeah. No, no, no — pieces don’t work in silos, and they shouldn’t work in silos. The benefit comes when the answer comes together. But yes, there are a number of studies that show that client engagement has a huge impact on customer engagement and the productivity of an organization.

But now we start to have tools that organizations can implement in their own workplace to create that connectivity.

And could you imagine if you’re working in a bank in the UK, for example, that has hundreds of thousands of branches, and you’re able to do that correlation?

Yeah. Pinpoint where our colleagues are unhappy, unsatisfied, disengaged, and you see the correlation with clients. Yeah. But you’re able to actually have a number of interventions in that little bubble and impact those customers.

Yeah. Especially if it — you could — it almost acts as a sort of early warning system.

So is that technology available now, or is that the direction?

No. That technology is available now. Have you… I haven’t — trying to say that? Going to try and implement it one day. I can’t say exactly when.

Yeah.

But I do want to implement it one day. It’s absolutely fascinating.

That really is.

Yeah. Especially the impact that can have on global businesses.

Yes. Having that transparency. Fascinating.

So I see AI and data basically informing everything that we do in go-to-market and marketing, so the how, the why, and the what come out better informed.

Yeah.

So we start — well, I’ve skirted around the edges there of saying, so is that stuff that you’re implementing now at Moneycorp?

So let’s talk more specifically about Moneycorp. So, you’ve been in the role, I believe, seven, eight months now, and transforming the marketing function.

That’s right.

Definitely. I’m sure.

What’s been your priorities? You’ve presumably come in the first few months finding your feet, working out what it is that you want to do. What are those priorities now on your to-do list?

I think the first and probably biggest priority, and where I have most of my energy, is repositioning the role of marketing within the organization.

Right.

There still are… Marketing can be a lot of things depending on what organization you’re at.

Yeah.

Previous organizations — whereas before marketing was a function of strategy, business development, commercial, design, and then PR and internal comms, as well as the actual advertising, promotion, and branding — so a full left-to-right brain function. Other places, usually in organizations that are bigger, it’s a lot more sliced up, and marketing will be more of the brand and advertising.

Yeah.

And I left marketing out of that on purpose, because I think marketing has a lot more of the strategic and rationale and modeling perspective too.

And at Moneycorp, traditionally, it was very much around brand and brand advertising promotion, right? And so it’s about repositioning in the organization around, okay, we’re bringing in new capabilities and new skills into the organization that will serve the organization in a different way. And that takes time.

Yeah. It takes time for the rest of the organization to adapt and understand how to leverage these new capabilities and what its role is in helping get to its next step.

That in itself is a process.

Yeah.

But then it’s also about building the capabilities. So we’re bringing in the skills around analytics, plugging into the data and using the data to inform what we do and how we do it.

We’re building in — and one of the big work streams that we’re building is very much around customer experience.

Right.

I think we’ve noticed that, but I think it’s the most important part of a marketing function — having the voice of the customer within the organization. And we are building those capabilities to tap into customers, whether it’s a wide outreach through surveys or starting to design those workshops where we sit in the room in focus groups, listen to customers, and get answers to questions we didn’t know we had.

But it’s also about how we transform those insights to market products, but it’s also on how we turn those insights into shaping products.

But it’s also around how do we turn those insights into how we serve clients. So what role is it going to have in shaping continuous improvement and operations?

At the end of the day, if we can get it right, I almost feel like saying at the end of the day, when you’re doing the budget process for the next year — usually the biggest process — the budget goes to IT, and you’ll have the voice of the customer telling the organization where it should be investing, depending on what matters most to that customer.

So again, it’s activating customers, bringing it into the heart of the organization for service and design, and helping it almost define the metabolic rate of the organization going forward.

Well, listening to you speak, I almost — I’m envisaging you building the voice of the customer both in the way that you go out and have moments in time — voice of the customer through surveys or similar — but potentially there’s a way to have that continuous always-on voice of the customer coming into the business as well, so that you’re creating that constant supply of data which is shaping the forms.

But presumably, there must be a business strategy that sits on top of that as well, saying, these are the questions that we want to learn from the voice of the customer in order to help us succeed on the overarching strategy of the business.

Oh, absolutely. No. The organization has a very clear strategy at a high level in terms of corporate, and it also has a very clear strategy in terms of business, of where it would like to go. That’s where it would like to go, because if we say where we want to go, then we go back into that arrogant space.

Yeah.

So where we think we’d like to go, where we think the customer wants, where we very strongly believe — but we want to confirm with the customer that that’s the right way to serve them.

And I’m asking about that specifically because you said previously at Moneycorp, it was the more brand, advertising, communication side of marketing, which is one part. But it seems that the stuff you’ve been brought in to do is a recognition from the business: actually, marketing can be a lot more. It’s the strategy side, so it can act as that growth driver to help us achieve the strategy.

Yes.

Now there definitely is a strategy, and it was that strategy, that significant ambition, that brought the recognition that we want a different type of marketing, and the business is plugging in and supporting all the other areas. Because when you have a transformation of this size, marketing is just one small piece of the puzzle.

Yeah. That’s reinventing itself in an organization like Moneycorp.

Mhmm.

I’d say all the different parts of the value chain are finding themselves reinventing and upgrading to the next level.

Well, I think what we’re trying to do as a management team is ensuring that this time — going back to systems thinking — we’re not in all separate lanes, but we’re like a puzzle connected, so we’re growing together. Mhmm. And that’s also part of the business strategy in terms of delivery.

Going back to the original question: the to-do list of the seven months. So, repositioning the role of marketing within the business. There’s a lot to be done there.

Embedding the voice of the customer into the organization — so those are the two, many of the voice of the customer.

I think there’s something around connectivity. And you’ll see all global businesses go through phases: franchise for a few years, a lot of adapting, a lot of autonomy in the different businesses around the globe. Then there’s this big swing to the other side where it becomes corporate. Once that becomes too strong, it swings back into franchise. All organizations flip back and forth toward franchises.

I think now is a moment where Moneycorp can globalize a bit.

Right.

And that’s about ensuring that there is a unique voice across the firm. It means that there’s a unique way of how we present ourselves across the globe.

It’s that we connect with customers with the same level, the same communication, the same messaging, the same carrying points — not just talking points — in a very similar way, especially because most of our clients will be naturally global.

As we think about connectivity in terms of a global payments and FX platform, with the drive for Moneycorp now, how do you manage that overarching global messaging? You are so localized within what — more so probably than most other businesses — that you have to really refine that localized messaging as well, I would assume.

What we’re doing is creating a global backbone, and we’re giving enough room for adaptation and localization.

Okay.

What we need to ensure is that the localization doesn’t lose sight of the global backbone.

Backbone.

Is there a system that you put in place to encourage that? Because you can’t be policing that, I imagine, across the volume of territories that you’re over.

So we have created a global function. We have representation across all geographies to make sure all voices are represented. We’re getting closer and closer to the business — the actual humans that interact with our clients. That’s where I call the part of the business to ensure that we have greater alignment.

We’re also putting in really basic stuff. On one end, we have these very fancy — I’m not going to put the names — tools that do customer experience, client and employee experience, and correlations with AI.

But then there’s very basic stuff. We just launched a very simple SharePoint portal.

Right.

That is now accessible to every colleague around the whole group, where we have our framework, branding, and value proposition in terms of global narrative, and where we have all the different sites also on that same portal with their own localization, but where everybody can see it.

Yeah.

So it’s not like one specific geography can localize it and someone on the other side of the pond doesn’t know what that looks like.

Yeah. But it’s there. Sometimes it’s basic stuff. Sometimes it’s just a robust SharePoint portal that everyone can access.

Yeah. It’s kind of a common-sense approach — getting the basics right. And maybe they haven’t been there before; you’ve got to have that infrastructure working. Presumably, educating the team around why.

Yeah. Why it’s important, consistency, all that stuff that goes into it.

Is there more information that you can say about the role you’re actually doing at the moment, breaking it down a bit more granularly, how the steps are to actually embed the voice of the customer?

Previously, when we had the initial conversation around this, you talked about sentiment analysis, feedback loops, NPS. I’m probing around that area.

We’re still very much in the initial phase. We just created the function at the beginning of the year and brought in someone to lead it. So very, very initial phase. But we do have an architectural skeleton of where we want to go.

So there’ll be something around having direct feedback from customers, whether it’s after a specific service and getting that post-service feedback loop, or having a general sentiment analysis. How is the relationship going? Are we strengthening, or are we losing points with the customer in a specific aspect?

And then it’s those different workshops, and in the service and post-service surveys that we’re launching, we want to implement something well-known in customer experience — the closed loop.

So if there’s a specific trade that happened and a customer wasn’t happy, we want to get that information very quickly, and we want to respond to the customer within a very short SLA. I don’t know exactly what that SLA will be yet, because it depends on the different case studies that come through.

But we have those, which is very direct one-to-one, close the loop. And then we have the ones where we want to turn it into actionable insights, where it becomes reporting that we plug into the different parts of the value chain of the organization.

And that’s where — and you alluded to that earlier — the business has a view on where it thinks it wants to go, but actually the voice of the customer should be the one that guides that.

Absolutely. So it’s about checking and validating with the customer that we’re on the right direction.

Yeah. Brilliant.

That’s where a little bit of humbleness comes into play in leadership and in business development too.

Do you think businesses within financials are getting better at being humble?

I genuinely do. I think they are bringing in the voice of the customer, having the customer support where an organization goes. It’s increasing, and you see it from the value proposition that we’re all getting.

Yeah.

Whether it’s a better app, different types of notifications, or different auxiliary tools and functions that help us manage our finances better, it’s because there is an increasing care about what we want and what adds value to us.

I wonder if it’s also driven by the fact that there’s more data now to prove the impact that it has.

Yeah. But that’s across the board. More data helps us make more informed decisions.

Yeah.

Okay.

Let’s go back into — we’ve gone a lot into the strategy side, but I’m also keen to talk about the brand-building elements as well, that you’re being tasked with.

How do you balance the brand-building side with the actual commercial drivers of the business?

It has to be fully aligned. I think that’s what’s also fascinating in today’s world on brand.

I think brand — there are a lot of ways to look at brand. Before I tapped into the marketing space, brand to me, very naively, was a pretty sticker. It was a color. It was a design.

I never thought much about whether it’s a square or a circle, or whatever designs behind it, or a bird, what color it is, and what initials are being used, to be very honest, when I was working in engineering, finance, and even strategy space.

Having dived into customer analysis, customer sentiment, understanding how customers perceive products and services, you realize there’s a lot more behind a brand than just the color.

Yeah.

And for me, branding is everything else that supports that color or that design or that name. Is this brand trustworthy? Can I trust them with my finances that I worked so hard to save and put away?

Can I trust that it’s going to transfer my finances at the moment I need, as quickly as I need, if I have a son or a relative somewhere farther I need to get funds to?

Is it going to help me save for tomorrow in the way that I need, so that when I get to tomorrow, I’m where I need to be?

I think the first thing that comes behind a brand is the level of trust. And that’s what I like to work on in terms of brand, and what this brand means, and what it translates into. I think with that done, half of the work and half the productivity that comes from the commercial aspect is already done.

Right. I see. Yeah.

So I think it will be one story to have a sales outreach when the brand isn’t known — there’s selling on brand, then selling on product, then selling on SLAs, then selling on the price point for all of the above.

When a brand is already known and trusted, half the sale is already done.

Yeah. And then it’s just around talking about the product and the service it’s bringing. I don’t think they can work separately.

Yeah.

And the brand is about how you deliver a business to customers.

When you consider the voice of the customer, and you bunch all of the businesses within financial services — the financial services sector — the delivery, the outputs, and the reasons why customers use these companies are very emotionally driven. Their whole lives are caught up within them.

And I think it’s surprising how — I don’t think the financial services sector as a whole is as advanced in its brand thinking as other sectors. But I think that those brands and businesses that do have a deep understanding of the impact and importance of generating trust within clients, I think they will excel within the markets compared to those that don’t.

And I — absolutely.

I see some fantastic businesses that are really advanced with their thinking on brand and the potential and importance of it. But some people still don’t pay it much thought or consideration, and I think that’s a mistake.

No. I completely agree. If I can bring my hobby into the conversation — one of my hobbies where I like to spend time, when I do have time, is on the role of mental health in the workplace.

Right.

And the massive amount of studying and research on it… and it was quite interesting. I was working at a bank when I bumped into the role of mental health in the workplace, when I realized one of the main contributors to a lack of mental health is actually a lack of financial health.

Right.

So if we think about the role that financial services can play in improving financial health, and the impact it will have on improving the mental health of society, it could be massive. And that’s when I fell in love with financial services, and I decided I was in the right industry.

Yeah. Yeah. Fabulous.

And you could think of it as a family and a human, but you can also think of it as the financial health of an organization. Because if you’re building the financial health of an organization, you’re in turn protecting employment, you’re protecting families once again.

Yep. Yep. You are a member of an organization that’s supporting mental health within workplaces as well.

I am. I am. I am part of MindForward Alliance.

Right.

It’s actually an organization that started in the UK here in London.

Right.

About — now I’m starting to forget — but about fifteen years ago, and it’s gone global.

Right.

And I was lucky enough to have established the chapter of MindForward Alliance in Portugal a couple of years ago, which is how I occupied the last year, year and a half that I was off the corporate world.

I find that fascinating. There’s something I’ve been very interested in about financial education, mainly because when I grew up, I had such poor financial education.

And now I have kids, and it’s top of mind. I’ve often thought that the industry could do more collectively to promote that within schools. I’ve got friends that are school teachers, and they tell me that financial education is taught within schools, but it’s certainly taught very little. What’s the situation like in Portugal?

I don’t think we’re there yet. No. I don’t think we’re there yet in Portugal. I’m an academic junkie — if you look at my LinkedIn — yeah. I like getting certifications, taking classes, doing tests, preparing for exams. It’s just something I like to do.

But if I had a vote as a parent and as a member of society, I would vote to delay some of the academic learning that we have, whether it’s math programs or science programs, and I would bring in financial health and financial literacy a lot younger, a lot earlier. Yeah. I think there are too many families that suffer and aren’t at their best because of lack of financial literacy.

I read a couple of days ago — I can’t remember where — that your relationship with money, the links you start making with it, start as young as nine or ten or something.

It’s actually even younger.

Would you?

Yeah. I would say even younger. I have an almost nineteen-year-old, and he was around four or five when one day I discovered this big bag of coins in his school bag.

Right.

And I was mortified thinking, what is he doing? Is he stealing from us? Where’s he taking these coins from? I was getting very nervous. I sat down with him and asked, “Where are you getting this money from?” He realized I was getting nervous, so he was scared to answer. And then I discovered that he was selling cookies at school.

Right.

So he was taking cookies from our cupboard and selling them — I don’t know if it was twenty or thirty cents in Portugal. He was five.

That’s fantastic. A lot younger than we think.

Yeah. That is. Yeah. Wow. Five years old, he was?

Five years old. Four or five — he was in reception.

Amazing. That’ll be a story at his wedding.

My opposite story to that is that my son — we suddenly got an alert on Amazon that we had ordered about a hundred and fifty plastic figurines that were coming through, a bill for over a grand. We’re like, what? So, yeah, less entrepreneurial than yours.

Were you able to cancel that?

We did cancel it, thankfully. Can you imagine them all coming through the letterbox on the same day? No.

Okay. Let’s go back on track again — onto brand. Moneycorp’s brand architecture, when you came in, it wasn’t quite where you felt it needed to be, if I remember correctly.

Yep.

How are you evolving the brand architecture? What does that look like in a kind of day-to-day, to-do-list approach?

The brand architecture we have today is an absolutely natural result of how an organization grows, like Moneycorp, where it starts with a specific product, a specific service, and a specific geography.

And then there’s an add-on, and you do a small adjustment to the brand. Then another add-on, another segment, another adjustment. Then another geography, another adjustment.

Right.

Yeah. Then there’s an acquisition, another slightly different adjustment. And all of a sudden, the result of this architecture is not really premeditated or engineered. It’s the result of actual natural growth.

So I think there’s a point in time where we need to go back to the beginning, go back to the drawing board, design that skeleton, and understand: how am I going to organize my brand in terms of geography? How am I going to reorganize my brand in terms of customer segments, products, and even sub-segments?

And I think we just need to go back to the drawing board. So we’re — again, I’m only seven months in — and we’re going back to the drawing board. What we really want to do is have that thinking in terms of architecture and a bit of engineering behind it.

Yeah.

And ensure that when we do redesign it, it will be scalable. So if tomorrow we want to increase segments, increase geographies, reshape the geographical footprint — maybe it’s not a country, it’s a region, or the other way around — it will have that flexibility to adapt.

I’ve listened to you describe it that way. It sounds like most businesses will go through issues because of the rate of growth phases that a business goes through. Once you get to a certain size, you have to go back and restructure it to absolutely fit the purpose for the next stage of a business’s life.

Absolutely.

This organization has been around for forty-five years. It has been reinventing itself in terms of products, services, and positioning, quite impressively.

So it’s natural that the architecture now needs a rethink — to where it is today and where it wants to go tomorrow.

And thinking back to listeners of the podcast who may be thinking about having to go through a similar challenge within their organizations: what’s one piece of advice you would give to those people going through a process of transformation within business growth?

I will always go back to my starting point, which is curiosity.

I think for marketers — but not just marketers — all leaders should always hold a huge element of curiosity. What are we missing? What are we getting wrong? What are our clients telling us? What’s the data telling us? What are our peers out there telling us?

We don’t exist alone in the world, so we can go back to that microeconomic curve and just explore. And keep an open mind and explore around listening. Again, we might have our customers’ best interests at heart, but let’s listen to customers and what the past is telling us too. Definitely curiosity. What else can we do?

If I can give two more pieces of advice, I would add a number two, which is: speak the language of the business.

Marketing needs to work with a lot of different parts of the value chain of an organization. It needs to work with IT. It needs to work with finance. It needs to work with HR a lot more than we think. It needs to work with product.

Going back to that jargon around finance you were saying a little while ago, we need to also park the marketing jargon.

Yeah.

And have the ability to speak the language of finance, IT, product, and HR, and understand how these roles intertwine, so that we are able to have a conversation around the table and not just the branding and promotional conversation. If we can do that, we can add a lot more value in terms of what we’re trying to deliver, contributing, but also receiving from different areas of the business.

And then lastly, but not least, marketing can be absolutely fascinating, especially for creative minds. I have a creative daughter who will get lost in the designs, creativity, and emotional impact that comes from the creative part of marketing.

I think one thing I would definitely suggest to all marketers is not to remove or reduce any of that, but ensure there’s always connectivity between the creative part and the commercial aspects.

Yeah.

Because it will only serve and work if it’s connected and actually producing results. So I’m doing an amazing event — how can I track it? Is it producing the results I needed? If it’s not, that’s okay, because information on what’s not working is just as valuable as what is working.

Is a commercial or advertising campaign working? I might think it was the best logo I ever thought of, but did it resonate with customers? Did it make my customers think what I wanted them to think, and resonate with them? Bring in those data points to check whether what we’re delivering is the right messaging.

So it’s very much about ensuring the commercial impact, whether it’s direct in terms of revenue and customer growth, or indirect in its intermediate KPIs that will help us deliver products and services to customers.

You said this has been coming up a lot in conversations you’ve been having about the importance of CMOs and folks within marketing being able to speak the language of the CFO and CEO, to actually give marketing a chance to have an impact on those bigger issues within the business.

If you’ve come from a traditional marketing background, you don’t pick that stuff up. So where do people go to close that gap, to improve their skill sets in speaking the language of the CFO? Are there resources you’d point them to?

I’d go back to my first piece of advice — curiosity.

Yeah.

One of the most impactful leaders in my career always reminded me: it’s okay to come to a table and ask questions.

Okay.

Very rare. We didn’t all show up like that. I definitely wouldn’t say I am fully experienced in all the financial services that I’ve dipped in and out of. I think it’s absolutely okay to walk into a room and say, “I didn’t get that feature of a product. What does that do again?”

Yep.

How does that serve customers? How does that work? Why is it, and why do customers pay for it? I didn’t get that financial report — what is it trying to tell me? What does it mean about the past? What does it mean about the future? What impact does it have anywhere else or with its operations?

I don’t get that. Why are we doing AML? What is AML? Why are we doing all these questionings? Why is it so hard? I think it’s absolutely fine.

Yeah.

Ask the questions.

Yeah.

The internet is amazing. You can get courses on everything, mini MBAs, free online programs, and learn whatever you want.

But in organizations, you can just tap around your colleagues. Go into a meeting and ask questions. It’s okay not to know.

Yeah. Yeah.

That goes back to our original point off-camera about the importance of being in and around the work to be in a position to ask those questions.

Yes. I do believe we’re in an interesting moment in time where we’ve gone from a lack of flexibility to integrate work and personal life, to full hybrid and remote.

I might have gone to the other extreme, and I think it’s time for us to find a balance so that we can have those conversations by the water cooler and the coffee machine.

Yeah. And ask those questions. What was that about again?

Yeah. Yeah. Just to do exactly this — to be more curious and learn faster.

Fabulous. Thanks so much, Anna, for joining us. I thoroughly enjoyed our discussion this afternoon. I hope it’s been okay for you as well.

Fantastic. Thank you. Definitely a good opportunity to take a step back and think about everything holistically.

Yeah. No. It’s brilliant. And good luck with your career at Moneycorp and getting all of those to-do lists ticked off.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening today to The Growth Engine. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates, or on hubagency.co.uk. Thank you, and see you next time.